On a couple of repulsive dictators, mostly
So in my old age I’m finding that the world is going to pot. Under the circumstances I’m lucky to be living in Australia.
Of course the world is much more than China, or the USA, or Russia (in population order), but these are the potty countries I’m referring to – or to be fairer and more accurate, the countries with the pottiest leaders – that I know of.
China has Xi Jingping, the first of the scumbags – not necessarily in order of scumbuggery. He’s in a battle of sorts with his military leaders, apparently because they’re not being warmongering enough. The USA has Trump – need I say more? And Putin – it’s now more or less official – has failed in his brief military operation against Ukraine, with a loss of men, or drone fodder, coming up to 2 million. Not that psychopaths care about such numbers.
Of these three horrific scenarios, the one I’m probably least willing to look at is the Trump shite. So… well let’s, look at Putinland. I’ve been watching The military show on Youtube, which can get quite technical at times, but they generally present a scenario of Russian failure. This is of course what I want to hear, but I’m also quite skeptical. The Russians surely aren’t this stupid. I’m surprised that Putin has miscalculated so badly, but I just can’t see him giving up after having invested so much in this invasion. And yet… if he had something more substantial to throw at the Ukrainians, leaving aside the nuclear option, he surely would have used it by now. And surely, even Putin’s position must be less secure after such devastating losses.
So… I’ve been watching more of The military show, which presents the devastation being wrought upon Kiev – so maybe they’re not being so one-sided, though it’s clear this is no Russian propaganda show, to put it mildly. I just hope their stuff is accurate. Recently they’ve presented ‘the most dramatic naval upset in modern history’, no less – that being the destruction of Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Ukraine, as even I knew, has long been a massive wheat and corn exporter to many NATO states, as well as China and other rather powerful countries. When the war started, those exports were reduced by almost 50%, and things were looking very grim for the country’s ability to fund its defences. However Ukraine and its allies appear to have outsmarted and out-manoeuvred the Russians, using mines, artillery and missiles – a ‘defensive triangle’ (watch The military show for details), and then developing its unmanned drone defence/attack systems with a rapidity that has apparently astonished the military world. They seem to be underwater drones, or not, pardon my ignorance, and they were designed to attack en masse. A second iteration of these drones, far more powerful than the first, has been launched successfully, and Ukraine’s exports have more or less completely recovered. And much of this response happened within the first year or so of the war! They’ve described it as ‘one of the most successful blockade-breaking operations in modern history’. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s been much competition – I’m such a spoiler.
So, hats off to Ukraine, in a situation in which the US ‘superpower’ under Frump has been mostly less than helpful, and NATO seemingly bound up by a less than helpful bureaucratic structure. Meanwhile, how is Mr Pudding faring after all these years of anti-Ukraine warfare – arguably starting in February 2014? Well, it seems that, though he’s nowhere near winning, he’s also nowhere near giving up. In fact, it seems he can’t give up after all his rhetoric and all his losses. This just can’t be all for nothing. And that of course is a dangerous situation indeed, because there is only the nuclear option. He can’t win otherwise, he can’t go on forever, but then, how can the nuclear option be a win? It won’t of course, so the whole thing becomes a monument to stubborn stupidity which can only end with the end of Putin. It’s truly tragic for the Ukrainian people, and the Russian people too.
So let’s look at China, which I’ve not really been focussing on (nor Russia really, for why focus on god-awful governments that are far away and you can’t do anything about? Hmmm). One website called China Update has the headline ‘Total Annihilation’, just in case people aren’t paying attention.
So apparently a couple of the top military figures of the country have been arrested by China’s dictator, Xi, and what with other brutalist changes, the military leadership ‘group’ has now been reduced from seven to two – but effectively one. Meanwhile a long-term anti-corruption drive, aka Bullshit Incorporated, has been fuelled by Xi’s paranoia and hubris, and has left ‘command chains fractured and experienced leaders sidelined’, which has supposedly degraded the country’s capacity to ‘conduct complex operations, particularly against Taiwan’. That sounds promising for Taiwan, but my impression over the years has been that Xi really really really wants to attack Taiwan and kill people there, and to do it yesterday. The reports I’m hearing about the situation, though, are confusing and conflicting. He likes ‘anti-corruption’ purges apparently, and he has, over time, trimmed down the political and the military leadership, the latter to just two. All of which can only make one laugh, or cry, at the Orwellian newspeak. We mock the North Korean title for its country – the Korean Democratic Republic – but surely the Chinese government, or leadership, calling its country ‘communist’, is even more risible, considering that communism is meant to be about collective control and sharing of government, labour, resources, etc. On that definition, China must surely be about the least communist nation on the planet, and more than 1.3 billion more Chinese people are being hoodwinked than North Korean people. And surely a large proportion of them know they’re being hoodwinked, but – what can they do? If you’ve lived such a lie all your life, that lie just becomes the reality.
So the number of party members who have been removed or disciplined for corruption during Xi’s rule has increased year on year, and it would be impossible to tell whether this purge has been fair given the lack of oversight of of what is essentially a dictatorship. And according to the video referenced below, Xi has managed to concentrate more power in his own hands, at least militarily, than any previous Chinese dictator of the ‘communist’ era (or at least since Mao, the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever known). He has also presided over a massive increase in military expenditure, with obviously ominous connotations. I mean, what could this ballooning expenditure be for?
I worry for Taiwan, which was experimenting with participatory democracy, according to Jess Scully’s hopeful Glimpses of Utopia.
References
Leave a Reply